Meet Lauren Bowker, London’s First Fashion-Channeling Witch

This week I met a witch—a fashion-channeling witch—who proceeded to blow my mind. Lauren Bowker lives and works in London, formerly in the cavernous Georgian cellars of Somerset House and now in new labs, where she devotes her life to creating formulae capable of transmitting what she describes as, “Everything in the atmosphere we just can’t see, as humans.” Bowker tells me she grew up “Interested in the invisible—in ghosts and X-rays, and trying to work out how to manipulate nature.” She may look like a latter-day Batcave goth, but, as I found out, the truly spooky thing about this former textile-design graduate, who permanently dresses in mourning (more of that in a minute), is the supernatural size of her intelligence. This Halloween she has risen again with the latest of her environmentally sensitive products in Selfridges—bags, scarves, wallets, iPhone covers, bracelets, conceptual jackets. It is all branded under her umbrella label The Unseen. Or, as she phrases it, “A platform of magic reality and change . . . set out to harness the extraordinary.” But wait! This is just the cover story, or Trojan horse, for what this woman really does. Beneath lies a research and development capability so serious that she has automotive engineers and neurologists banging on her door.

I’m never one for spiritual mumbo jumbo myself, but my first encounter with Bowker, which was actually last year, was of an unforgettable order. Bowker has developed a fabric which can electronically detect emotions. She put a brain-scanning headset on me, and sat me in front of a fabric sculpture which gradually changed color, like a moth’s wing: blue for curiosity, green for wanting to communicate, yellow for happiness, purple for a medititative state. Well, I didn’t get purple—it was the middle of Fashion Week—but, (surprisingly) I didn’t get red, which indicates anxiety, either. “Luckily, you didn’t get gray, either,” said Bowker, laughing. “That’s bad. That means emotionally dormant.” It is this kind of work, as well as a Swarovski spinel-gem headpiece, which visibly displays temperature changes in the brain, that has excited neurologists. How she does it, she cannot tell; “We protect our processes,” but the things she is working on may one day change people’s lives. “Going forward, the technology may be useful in treating depression, or just tracking our emotional states—say, on a watch, or on a yoga mat, which could show you when you've reached a state of calm.”

During her bachelor’s degree at Manchester Metropolitan University, where Bowker fought to study chemistry as well as textiles, she had already created a chemical compound which absorbs air pollution. Later on, she concocted a wash-off oil paint which visibly records how Formula One cars perform in a wind tunnel. There is more in the works she can't talk about—and all because she refused to articulate her breakthroughs in the usual science-y medium. Instead, Bowker's medium—her calling card—is demonstrably, physically wearable fashion and accessory pieces. “I knew I didn't want to create concepts, to just write academic scientific papers which never result in anything,” she says. “I wanted to make real stuff, and to show people—this isn’t futuristic, it’s here today!” I don't have a crystal ball, but I’m ready to wager we’ll be hearing more of Lauren Bowker. What she’s secretly working toward, she mysteriously hints, could be “life-changing technology.” Bowker dresses in black as a memento mori of the mock funeral she had for the consultancy company she set up after her master's degree at the Royal College of Art, and, she says, “to remind myself every day of my commitment to The Unseen.” This is a witch to watch.